'It's total bull': Jon Krakauer hates 'Everest'
screen. In “Prophet’s Prey,” a documentary about Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he’s seen as a hard-hitting reporter who helped put polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs behind bars. And in “Everest,” the feature film about the infamous 1996 disaster on the world’s highest mountain, he’s the writer who stays in his tent while his climbing teammates are marooned in a blizzard.
Take a guess as to which he’d rather filmgoers see.
“It’s total bull,” Krakauer says of “Everest,” which he saw upon its debut in IMAX cinemas last weekend. “Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read ‘Into Thin Air.' "
“Into Thin Air,” of course, is the 1997 bestseller Krakauer wrote about his experience on Everest, when eight climbers died after getting trapped in an unexpected storm. The new Universal Pictures film about that fateful day, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, is not based on Krakauer’s book. He sold the memoir’s rights to Sony Pictures just as the book was published, and the studio went on to make a poorly reviewed television movie about the tragedy that same year.
“People told me, ‘Movies never get made. Take the money. What do you have to lose?’” the writer, now 61, recalls. “I curse myself for selling it at all. What I learned from the TV movie was that dramatic films take dramatic license, and when you sign a document, you can do whatever you want with me. It wasn’t worth the money I got.”
Krakauer hasn’t soured on Hollywood altogether. After all, he’s in Los Angeles this week promoting “Prophet’s Prey,” which he produced and appears in as an expert because he wrote a book on the Mormon sect, 2003’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” (A feature version of the book is currently under development with Ron Howard.) He also plays a prominent role in another documentary out this month, “Meru,” about climbers attempting to scale a 21,000-foot Himalayan mountain. And he was pleased with the way Sean Penn handled a 2007 adaptation of his “Into the Wild,” the tale of how outdoorsman Christopher McCandless ventured into Alaska and eventually starved there.
“I only went on the set on the very last day and said, ‘Sean, if you [screw] this up, I don’t want you to say I was there,’” says Krakauer, who advised Penn in an unofficial capacity because the McCandless family was in charge of the film rights. “And he didn’t [screw] it up. When he showed me the rough cut, I wanted to kiss him, I was so happy.”
But then there’s “Everest.” No one asked for Krakauer’s input on the story, and he says he was never approached by Michael Kelly, who played him in the film. In fact, he considers the film a personal affront from Kormákur himself. He’s particularly aggrieved by a scene in which his character is asked to help with the rescue by Russian guide Anatoli Boukreev but replies he cannot because he is “snow blind.”
“I never had that conversation,” Krakauer says. “Anatoli came to several tents, and not even sherpas could go out. I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked.”
“Our intention in the tent scene that Mr. Krakauer mentions was to illustrate how helpless people were and why they might not have been able to go out and rescue people...” says Kormákur in a reply sent to The Times through his publicist. “They were not malicious. They were helpless.” The filmmaker said he had access to a number of books written about the 1996 events on Everest, as well as “all the radio calls that went on in the Adventure Consultants camp.” (Krakauer was embedded with guide Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants team on Everest, gathering material for an Outside Magazine article.) Furthermore, the director says, four advisors who were “present on the mountain during that disaster and participated in the rescue” worked on the movie. “The writers and I tried to look at things from a fair point of view without choosing sides,” Kormákur says in his statement.
